Sozialindex für Grundschulen in Mülheim an der Ruhr

The German school system is socially highly unequal, as educational research criticized for a long time. While in some schools socially privileged pupils are the majority, other schools are composed by mostly poor pupils. The combination of socio-geographic and educational geographic considerations leads to a social school index, which clearly shows how strong schools are socially privileged or disadvantaged. The paper presents a practical example of building a social school index for cities and compares the results. The residence-based density index on grid data from German Social Code (book 2) is preferred because it is unproblematic in terms of data protection law and can be extended at the level of 100 × 100?m grids. Calculating detailed and differentiated social school indices with school enrollment data leads to very good results, but is much more work.     

Volksunruhen in Württemberg 1789–1801

The juridical force of time forms a critical, but hitherto unexplored part of Hugo Grotius’s discourse on the justice of war and peace. Grotius defines war as a span of time in which disputed rights and armed conflicts between states are examined in reference to temporal coordinates. This method allows him to adjust otherwise static laws to meet the demands of times and spaces in an increasingly expanded world. In doing so, Grotius is also able to reconcile multiple layers of laws in a temporal framework, which suspends one layer of law, to be revived at later times. Finally, cautious in the use of the language of time, Grotius admits both that right demands immediacy, and that justice suffers delays. By this nexus of delay (mora) and emergency (necessitas), Grotius warns against the abuse of ‘time’ as a legal concept to justify unlawful claims, which still rings with alarm today.     

Grüne Infrastruktur in den Städten Nordrhein-Westfalens

Hardly any other city in North Rhine-Westphalia has such a green image as the city of Münster. It embodies the image of a livable city in Germany. Other North Rhine-Westphalian cities also work on their external perception and are approaching the task of getting a greener image for themselves in many ways. A central question is how it is done precisely and whether urban green infrastructure can be a locational factor to affect location-based marketing. This article deals with the strategies of various cities in North Rhine-Westphalia.     

SS-Unterscharführer Adolf Storms and the massacre of Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers in Deutsch Schützen

Adolf Storms was not hard to find in the summer of 2008. He was listed in the German telephone book. The former SSUnterscharführer, who had been a member of the Waffen-SS Panzer Division Wiking, was accused, along with two other SS men, of having shot to death at least fifty-seven Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers on 29 March 1945 in Deutsch Schützen, a village close to the Austrian-Hungarian border. Immediately after that massacre, he allegedly executed a Jew – a man, name unknown, who could not walk any further – by shooting him from behind. Adolf Storms had lived in Duisburg under his true name since the late 1940s. In 2008, the author interviewed Storms and two Hitler Jugend (HJ) leaders who also took part in this crime, and three Jews who survived the massacre. In 2009, Storms was charged with murder and as an accessory to murder in Düsseldorf. In June 2010, shortly before the decision for the trial to commence, he died at the age of ninety-one. This case study scrutinizes the intersection of ideology, Nazi morality, motivation and situational factors in perpetrating massacres. It also analyses how the judicial system in Austria dealt with this crime.     

Jüdischer alltag in Deutschland, 1933–1945

While discussions of the debate between Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg over ‘secularisation’ focus primarily on the methodological utility of the concept, the difference between them was also one of the philosophical commitments and substantive claims about modernity. This difference is not always obvious. One way of bringing it out is to address the different contexts in which they produced their most famous statements about secularisation. But another, and one that will be pursued here, is to consider the critical dialogue that both thinkers engaged in with Nietzsche. Put briefly, while Löwith thought that Nietzsche misunderstood the ancients, Blumenberg thought that he misunderstood the moderns. For Löwith, Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return is not Greek, but an aggressive countergospel that owes much to the Christian culture it seeks to oppose; for Blumenberg, Nietzsche assumes, wrongly, that the self-belittlement of man by theology has been succeeded by the self-belittlement of man by science. In addition, Blumenberg – unlike both Nietzsche and Löwith – thinks that he can mount a robust defence of both modern science and progress.     

From Süleyman Pasha to Mehmet Fuat Köprülü: Roman and Byzantine history in late Ottoman historiography

Abstract

The following is a continuation of the task set out in my Note in BMGS 10 (1986) 211–22. Working towards a Bibliography, I have tried to bring together, in a corpus, Ottoman Turkish works of some importance dealing with Roman and Byzantine history (including historical topography) which appeared as books, or part of books, between c.1870 and 1920. A particular aim has been to illustrate the development of this corpus in relationship with ‘westernising’ trends in the historiography of the Ottoman empire over the same period.